nce, give them up to justice? Understand me, I wish
to hear nothing more of these men. I wish to be perfectly ignorant of
their whole proceedings. I wish to have no information whatsoever,
except my own suspicions, for if I had, I should feel myself bound
immediately to cause their arrest. But from what you have said in
regard to Sir John Fenwick; from what the Duke has said on various
occasions; and from what I myself have remarked, I am strongly
inclined to believe that there are matters going on which can but end
in ruin to those engaged in them, if not in all the horrors of a
civil war."
"That I should not mind--that I should not mind!" cried Green--"let
us have a civil war; let every man lay his hand upon his sword and
betake him to his standard. That is the true, the right, the only
right way to get rid of an usurper. It has been with the very view of
that civil war you talk of that I have banished myself from the
station in which I was born, that I have walked by night instead of
by day, and that I have kept in constant preparation, throughout the
whole of the south of England, the seeds, as it were, of a future
army. And now what have they done? Not only trusted the command of
all things to others, but given that command to men who would do, by
the basest and most dastardly means, that which I would do by open
force and bold exertion: men who have mixed up crimes of the blackest
die with the noblest aspirations that ever led on men of honour to
the greatest deeds; who have soiled and sullied, disgraced and
degraded, the cause for which I have shed my blood, ruined my
fortune, and seen all the fair things of life pass away like a dream.
By heavens, I could cry as if I were a girl or a baby," and he dashed
away a tear from his eye which he could not restrain; "and now," he
continued, "and now if I do not prevent them they will put a damning
seal to all their follies and crimes, which will render that holy and
noble cause horrible in the eyes of all men, which will brand it for
ever with infamy and shame, and leave it blighted and loathsome, so
that men will shrink from the very thought thereof."
"But why not prevent them?" cried Wilton, "why not give up such
traitors and villains to justice at once?" "Why not?" replied Green;
"because there are men amongst them who have fought side by side with
me in the day of battle; because there are some foolish when others
are wicked; because that there are many who abhor their acts as much
as I do, but who w